Acting President and Prime Minister Han Duck-soo is speculated to be resigning from his post as early as Thursday, to declare a bid for the presidency in the upcoming election.
This comes amid news reports that Han was considering stepping down from his post as the legal deadline approaches on Sunday for civil servants to quit if they want to run for office.
According to local reports, Han will likely be presiding over a ministerial-level meeting on national security issues Thursday morning and will resign Thursday afternoon. Han is also considering delivering a speech to the nation before his resignation.
If Han resigns, he will likely register himself as an independent candidate to run in the presidential election on June 3, on either May 10 or 11, because the major party primaries to nominate presidential candidates have already taken place.
In the event of Han's resignation, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Choi Sang-mok will become acting prime minister and president again -- South Korea's fourth leadership change in six months, since Yoon Suk Yeol's Dec. 3 martial law declaration.
Unlike Hwang Kyo-ahn, the then-acting president who declared he would not run for president after former President Park Geun-hye was impeached and removed on bribery and coercion charges in 2017, Han's response to the question of whether he is running for president was "no comment," in an interview with Financial Times April 20.
The conservative bloc appears to be exploring the possibility of a campaign merger to better counter Rep. Lee Jae-myung, who overwhelmingly won the nomination of his liberal Democratic Party with 89.77 percent of the vote in the primary that ended Sunday, and has been leading the entire field of candidates.
In the conservative People Power Party, presidential primary candidate and former Labor Minister Kim Moon-soo has said that he was open to merging his campaign with Han Duck-soo's to appeal to a broader spectrum of South Korean voters. Kim is vying for the major conservative party's nomination, along with former party chair Han Dong-hoon, who has criticized talk of merging the candidacies of the party primary winner and the acting president as stemming from "defeatism."
Prime Minister Han has served in the position since 2022 as an appointee of conservative former President Yoon Suk Yeol.
On Wednesday, Han held talks with US Secretary of the Navy John Phelan in Seoul over ways to explore bilateral cooperation in the field of shipbuilding. If Han quits Thursday, the meeting would mark Han's final mission handling foreign affairs as South Korea's interim leader.
Following the Constitutional Court's April 3 removal of Yoon from office for his attempted self-coup, Han pledged to manage election affairs with fairness and transparency in the first Cabinet meeting after Yoon's ouster, April 8.
That same day, Han and US President Donald Trump held a 28-minute phone call, and since then, Han has pushed talks to make a deal with the Trump administration on the 25-percent "reciprocal" tariffs Trump announced on imported goods from South Korea but paused for 90 days one week later.
The Democratic Party of Korea has suspected that Han was trying to use his engagement in tariff talks with the US as leverage for his presidential bid. It also denounced Han for engaging in negotiations without being authorized to do so as an interim leader who had not been elected president.
Acting President Han Duck-soo attempted to "sugarcoat the tariff negotiations with the United States as his own achievement to use it as a springboard for his presidential bid," selling out South Korea's national interests, said Democratic Party spokesperson Rep. Hwang Jung-a on Wednesday.
This followed US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's remarks during a press conference at the White House Tuesday local time that South Korea "wants to have the framework of a trade deal done before they go into elections."
The main liberal party also called for an immediate probe into Han's alleged violation of the State Public Officials Act, following a report in local daily Hankyoreh Wednesday that Han's close aides had already resigned en masse and signed the contract for the office used by conservative lawmaker Rep. Na Kyung-won, who did not make the cut in the People Power Party's primary, to use it as his campaign headquarters.
consnow@heraldcorp.com
